After
Fig. 54. The Dupljaja model in: Peter Gelling and Hilda Ellis Davidson, 1967, The
Chariot of the Sun and other rites and symbols of the northern bronze age, New York,
Frederick A. Praeger. pp. 119-121: "It is of more than casual interest to establish
that there was a close identiy between the two forms of sun-worship. Central Europe was
very much less remote from the literate civilizations of the Mediterranean, in particular
from that of Greece, and Sprockhoff has shown in a brilliant paper that the possibility
exists of actual religious contacts between the two regions (Sprockhoff, 1954, pp. 28
ff.). The vital link is a clay model found at Dupljaja in Yugoslavia (Fig. 54). It
consists of a kind of chariot, with a bird perched on its front, drawn by two larger birds
whose bodies merge back into it. The floor of the chariot is marked with a sun symbol, on
top of which stands a male figure in a long robe who must be regarded as an
anthropomorphic representation of the sun. The model is essentially the exact equivalent
of the Trundholm chariot, with birds taking the place of the horse, and a human figure
replacing the upright disk. If we look southwards to Greece we find in Apollo a god who
resembles the Dupljaja figure in that he also was carried across the sky by swans. The
classical expression of this belief is in a hymn by Alcaeus, who was writing in the early
sixth century BC. The work is unfortunately lost, but the gist of it is known from a
paraphrase by Himerius, a Greek rhetorician of the fourth century A.D. When Apollo was
born, Zeus gave him a golden headband, a lyre and a chariot -- 'and swans were 'the
chariot' -- intending that he should fly to Delphi. Instead he flew to the land of the
Hyperboreans, and stayed there for a year. The phrase 'swans were the chariot' describes
most admirably the Dupljaja model: they did not simply draw the chariot -- they
constituted it. The resemblance is reinforced by Apollo's connection with the
Hyperboreans, which is best expressed in a story told by Herodotus (bk iv, c.33). He says
that the Hyperboreans were in the habit of sending sacred objects to Delos, Apollo's
island, and we are to assume that they still them in his day...The most interesting point
is that the earliest part of the journey was towards the west. Believing as they did that
the word Hyperborean meant 'beyond the north wind', it is hard to see why the Greeks
included a westerly stage in the journey if the story was pure fabrication. In fact it
fits very well with a place of origin in the middle Danubian region, which was one of the
most vital areas of the Urnfield culture. The Bronze Age amber route had followed the
Adriatic, and to reach the sea from the Hungarian stretch of the Danube it is necessary to
travel approximately westwords...Apollo, as we know him in Greek tradition, has a complex,
slightly foreign, character, and as he has strong connections with the east which cannot
possibly be reconciled with his northern contacts, we are oblied to recognize that he is a
composite divinity. One strain in his ancestry must have come from central Europe, from
the region which worshipped the sun in association with a bird; so theoretically it ought
to be possible to deduce something from his cult about central European sun-worship. In
practice this turns out to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the classical
Apollo has little or nothing to do with the sun. He was essentially the embodiment of the
ideal (seldom realized) discipline of Hellenic life, one aspect of which, law-giving, was
especially under his patronage. His identification with the sun-god appears to be late and
artificial..."
